Following the announcement in late June, Google have now officially transitioned over to their newly-branded Google Marketing Platform, which sees the curtain come down on their ‘DoubleClick’ brand 22 years after it first launched in 1996.
Display and Video 360 (DV360) brings together features of Google’s display advertising products into one unified platform, including Bid Manager, Studio and Audience Center, for end-to-end campaign management.
After working within DV360 for a number of weeks, the programmatic team at Croud got together to discuss the top five features they love about the newly-branded platform; from practical timesaving measures to more effective additions to the platform.
1) Insights
According to Google, 360,000 user hours per year are spent waiting for ‘Google Support’ to provide resolutions to common campaign errors. It’s no surprise then that we’re big fans of the newly-launched Intelligence Panel in DV360. This feature provides users with a quick way of looking at campaign health. The Intelligence Panel prevents users from having to dive into each insertion order (IO) and line item individually to diagnose problems with their campaigns. The hope is this feature will reduce the amount of time users spend communicating with Support.
A similar feature to the Intelligence Panel sits on the homepage of DV360. Here, users get a broader view of their entire DV360 activity across all advertisers, specifically highlighting underpacing IOs, underperforming IOs, and any rejected creatives.
2) Audiences
There is now a whole dashboard dedicated to audience composition (another welcomed time-saving feature). DV360 provides a unified audience-building experience—all under one user interface. The tool allows us to find demographic, device, and interest (affinity and in-market) information of our first-party audiences. There and then, custom audiences can be created off the back of this data to deploy into targeting strategies.
3) Reporting
According to Google, before the introduction of instant reporting, 36% of user time was spent on building repetitive reports!
We’ve embraced the new Instant Reporting feature with open arms which acts as an interactive dashboard that updates in real-time as we input custom dimensions and metrics. While there is a slight limitation in the fact that Instant Reporting can only be used to look at data from the past 30 days, it does serve as a great tool for quick campaign performance checks and simple analysis. This data can be visualised—just like in Excel—by adding bar, line, pie, or scatter charts.
4) Creative
For those like Croud who have a creative team in-house, the new unified creative workspace feature within DV360 is a welcomed addition to the platform. It brings a host of benefits, including the ability for creative teams to pull reports, make real-time updates to creatives for sturdy A/B testing, as well as hosting new formats which will be available to build within the DV360 platform.
5) Inventory
DV360 is introducing some pretty cool features from an inventory perspective, including more audio partners such as Pandora and talkSPORT, among others. This provides marketers with a great way of reaching those tricky millennials outside the world of social media, and target audiences based on factors such as mood, personality, and more. Elsewhere, we’ll be able to purchase inventory in Waze (the GPS navigation software), which introduces us to the world of in-car activity, as well as the ability to buy Gmail ads programmatically (Gmail boasts over 1 billion users globally!).
And there you have it, our top five reasons why we love Display and Video 360. For more information and to find out how you can use these new features effectively on your next campaign, get in touch with the programmatic team today.
